Why colonialism is bad

The women were sexually assaulted. Two of the men were castrated. The most severe gruesome torture you could imagine. Likewise unmentioned is what happened in India under British rule: the horrific Amritsar massacre , the mass famines that killed millions, and the horrors of the partition.

French crimes in Algeria : unmentioned. German genocide in Namibia : unmentioned. I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.

But apparently this is not the case, because the Third World Quarterly chose to publish them. This article does not read as if it is attempting to be taken seriously. I expect Gilley wants the following to happen: people will be outraged.

They will call for the article to be retracted. This is a dynamic that has occurred many, many times. People got upset, for obvious reasons, and students objected to having to be taught by a white supremacist. The liberal reaction focuses on the moral heinousness.

I am also very concerned that this could be a PR coup for the right, as so many of these things are. But it is the continuation of revisionist thinking that beckons a revisiting of the question of colonialism and its impact on the continent from a decolonial perspective, challenging the colonial and liberal desire to rearticulate the empire as an ethical phenomenon. But the selective use of such examples does not paint a complete picture. Any attempt to credit the British empire for the abolition of slavery, for instance, ignores the ongoing resistance of enslaved Africans from the moment of capture right up to the plantations in the Americas.

The Haitian Revolution of still stands as a symbol of this resistance: enslaved African people rose against racism, slavery and colonialism — demonstrating beyond doubt that the European institution of slavery was not sustainable. Where is the British empire in this description of the heinous kidnapping and commodification of the lives of Africans?

The fact is that African struggles were not undertaken for a trinket like getting voting rights under colonialism. They fought for decolonisation and rehumanisation. The third example, that the British empire became the nerve centre of armed resistance to fascism during the second world war , may be accurate.

What, fundamentally, is colonialism? In it, he argues that the colonial project was never benevolent and always motivated by self-interest and economic exploitation of the colonised. But without a real comprehension of the true meaning of colonialism, there are all sorts of dangers of developing a complacent if not ahistorical and apologetic view of it, including the one that argues it was a moral evil with economic benefits to its victims. Both conservative and liberal revisionism in the studies of the empire and the impact of colonialism reflect shared pessimistic views about African development.

The economic failures, and indeed elusive development, in Africa get blamed on the victims. The disorder is said to be the norm in Africa. African leadership is roundly blamed for the mismanagement of economies in Africa.

Yes, there are economies in Africa, not African economies; African economies were long destroyed by colonialism. While it is true that African leaders contribute to economic and development challenges through things like corruption, the key problems on the continent are structural, systemic and institutional.

That is why even leaders like Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who were not corrupt, did not succeed in changing the character of inherited colonial economies so as to benefit the majority of African peoples.

Today, what exacerbates these ahistorical, apologetic and patronising views of the impact of colonialism on Africa is the return of crude right-wing politics — the kind embodied by former US President Donald Trump, that remains even after his term has ended.

It is the strong belief in inherent white supremacy and in the inherent inferiority of the rest. But right-wing politics is also locking horns with resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the 21st century, symbolised by global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall.

After all, murder, torture and exploitation are wrong whether or not they occur in the context of colonial occupation.

If all we can do to explain the nature of colonialism is point at the fact that it typically involves the perpetration of these crimes, we cannot vindicate the thought that there is something distinctively wrong with it. And yet, intuitively the victims of colonial domination have suffered a distinctive wrong over and above those associated with these crimes.

How should we understand the nature of this wrong? I answer this question by arguing that colonial domination undermines the capacity of political communities to exercise their self-determining agency in a particular way. Most users should sign in with their email address. If you originally registered with a username please use that to sign in. To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. If I tell them Churchill starved the Bengalis, there will be another comparison. It stops us from having the necessary national conversation about the British Empire. Maybe, if we had that conversation, this Bristol student would have considered these things before opting to throw a colonial chic party.

I mean, if my man just wanted to put on a sherwani and look sick, he would have fared better organising a Bollywood party. In a key scene, Jinna and Nehru are arguing and Mountbatten suggests dividing the country up for the first time, which gives both leaders pause. This trend towards demanding gratitude needs to stop.